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Are you tired of small text areas in web forms and wish that you could simply make them bigger? Say goodbye to those small text areas with the Textarea++ extension for Firefox.

Before

As an example of a fixed area text box, we decided to take a quick look at the comment forms here at the How-To Geek website.

The text area before installing the extension…

Setup & Installation

All that you will need to do is install the extension and you are ready to start enjoying that custom sized text area goodness. There are no options or modifications to worry about.

Textarea++ in Action

Just for fun we grabbed onto the empty text area and gave it a quick “stretch”… You can make the text area as large as you need to before you start writing!

Here is what the scrollbar function will look like on those text areas if you are not wanting to stretch the text area out…

Note: The How-To Geek website’s comment forms do have a built in scrollbar function but the forms on many other websites do not.

Have a lot that you want to write and be able to clearly see at the same time? Not a problem! You can really stretch that text area out and enjoy scrollbar goodness too. Feel free to write to your heart’s content!

Conclusion

If you have been frustrated with under-sized text areas in web forms, then Textarea++ will definitely bring much needed relief to your browsing experience.

Akemi Iwaya is a devoted Mozilla Firefox user who enjoys working with multiple browsers and occasionally dabbling with Linux. She also loves reading fantasy and sci-fi stories as well as playing "old school" role-playing games. You can visit her on Twitter and Google+.

Comments (5)

Hey Asian Angel – I have always liked to use It’s All Text (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4125) for text editing in a website. Like your plugin, it allows full screen editing, instead of that pokey little area where they think you can work! However, the difference is that It’s All Text takes you out to a full offline editor (like Textpad, for example:- http://www.textpad.com/download/) and the advantage here is that you hit save and it sends your work back to the web page (turning the page amber-yellow, so that you can see that it changed.) However, another great feature is the fact that you have an offline copy of what you did. So, whatever the site does to mangle your work (or even lose it, and I have had this happen to me!) you still have the offline copy, which you can even save to a different folder for safekeeping!)
Warm wishes! Keep the tips coming. I’m an avid reader of all of your stuff! :)

You do realize that just because you can make a TextArea bigger doesn’t mean that the script that processes it has to accept everything you type? Many forms (every form on my site, for example) deliberately limit the post size and even if you are under that, may trim some input to a fixed size (which I do also).

Just ‘cuz yiou can write it doesn’t mean it’s going to get there :-)

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